Richard Rashke - Useful Enemies

Courtroom A-101 was a cavernous modern hall with cathedral ceilings and bright white walls. It hummed with anticipation and subdued respect. A single red fire extinguisher gave the room its only spot of color. With the permission of presiding judge Ralph Alt, thirty to forty photographers and TV cameramen were allowed in the well of the courtroom. While they waited for John Demjanjuk to enter for their photo of the day, they snapped pictures of anything that moved.

The panel of seven judges entered the courtroom at eleven o’clock, one hour late. Judge Alt apologized. It had taken longer than anticipated to accommodate all the photographers and cameramen, he explained.

Just before the door to the right of the judges’ bench opened, there was an eerie silence, as if two hundred people were holding their breaths. Then there was a loud collective gasp. A medical technician wheeled John Demjanjuk into the courtroom on a hospital gurney. He was draped in a light blue plastic surgical blanket to protect him from courtroom viruses. He wore dark glasses, a blue-gray baseball cap, a black leather jacket, and, under it, a sweatshirt that matched the color of his cap. He lay motionless and his mouth hung open. With his hands crossed on his chest, he looked like a corpse in a coffin.

As soon as Demjanjuk entered, the courtroom lost all semblance of decorum as photographers and TV cameras flooded the accused with lights and surrounded his gurney, snapping picture after picture from every possible angle for fifteen minutes. It was as if he were a freak in a legal circus. Through all the incessant clicking of shutters and the subdued voices of television commentators talking to cameras, Demjanjuk didn’t open his eyes or even stir.

A few spectators watched with sympathy. A ninety-year-old man was dying. Was this justice or a travesty of justice? A trial or a spectacle? Wasn’t it cruel and unusual punishment? Why didn’t the court call off the whole charade?

The majority were cynical. The Simon Wiesenthal Center had exploded the “poor, sick Demjanjuk” myth. It posted a video on YouTube in April 2009—just weeks before Demjanjuk boarded a plane for Munich on a stretcher and looking like death—showing him getting in and out of a car and walking unassisted down a street in Seven Hills, Ohio.

John Demjanjuk might be old, the cynics said. He might be sick. But he was clearly playing to the Munich court, hoping the judges would stop the trial on humanitarian grounds or soften their final judgment.

Efraim Zuroff, a top Nazi hunter at the Simon Wiesenthal Center, was one of the cynics. “[Demjanjuk] has a vested interest in appearing as sick and as frail as possible,” Zuroff said, “and he’s going to play it up to the hilt…. He belongs in Hollywood.”

If Demjanjuk was playacting, he was so good at it that it nearly worked. During the course of the eighteen-month trial, dozens of court sessions would be canceled or abbreviated because of real or alleged illness. Under German law, a trial has to start over if it is delayed for more than four weeks. If one added up all the missed court time, it would be close to the four-week limit.

For the next eighteen months, Demjanjuk would arrive at court either on a gurney or in a wheelchair. His appearance would hardly ever change. A female interpreter would sit next to his left ear, constantly talking to him. He gave no indication that he heard or understood her. Every now and then, he would shift to his left side or twitch and wince or move a hand—the only signs that he was still alive.

On several occasions, he would complain of chest or back pain or difficulty in breathing. The court-appointed doctor, who was always present when Demjanjuk was in the courtroom, would ask the bench for a recess. The medical technician would wheel the gurney or wheelchair out of the room and into the hallway for a private examination. After five or ten minutes, the doctor would return with a verdict: The session could resume or must be canceled.

When Demjanjuk appeared to be in pain, Judge Alt would ask him what was wrong. He would reply through his interpreter: “All I can say is I need to be brought to the [prison] hospital, not the courtroom.”

Asked by Judge Alt if he wanted to examine a document being submitted into evidence, he would say: “That’s a joke. With my pain, I cannot look at anything. I can’t even listen anymore.”

The courtroom health drama raised one of the most important issues of the trial. How sick was John Demjanjuk? How much pain was he really in?

A team of doctors had examined Demjanjuk when he arrived in Munich in May 2009, six months before the trial opened, to determine if he was physically fit to stand trial and mentally capable of understanding the proceedings. Although he had high blood pressure, which was normal for a man of his age and weight, they found that his heart was in good condition for his age. A battery of psychological tests showed that he could both understand and reason.

Aside from the general fatigue that comes with old age, resulting in a lack of mental stamina, Demjanjuk suffered from two serious medical conditions. He had myelodysplastic syndrome (MDS), a preleukemia bone marrow disease accompanied by severe anemia and fatigue that necessitated blood transfusions every four to six weeks. And he had spinal stenosis, a narrowing of the spinal canal that compresses the spinal cord and pinches the nerves. It was an extremely painful condition that required pain-relief injections. Given his health problems, the medical team recommended courtroom sessions of no longer than ninety minutes and no more than two a day.

Throughout the trial, Demjanjuk’s court-appointed defense attorney, Ulrich Busch, would ask the court to terminate the proceedings because his client was too sick and in too much pain to follow them. Presiding judge Alt would consult with the court-appointed doctor, Albrecht Stein, then rule that Demjanjuk was healthy and the trial would continue. It was almost as if Busch were attempting to build a case for a later appeal if the court found Demjanjuk guilty.

John Demjanjuk didn’t mince words in his opening statement to the court. He called Germany arrogant in charging him with accessory to murder. Sobibor was a German SS camp, he said, run by German SS officers who forced Soviet POWs to work there. Germans should be on trial, not a low-level Ukrainian slave laborer.

Germany is to blame for the deaths of eleven million Ukrainians, he said.

Germany is to blame for the loss of my home in Ukraine.

Germany is to blame for condemning me to die of starvation in a POW camp.

Germany is to blame for the destruction of my family, my hopes, and my future.

How dare Germany use a former Soviet POW to distract the nation from the real criminals of Sobibor—the men who ordered the execution of innocent Jews and ran the gas chambers!

So began the trial of Iwan of Sobibor. The gallery didn’t boo or hiss during Demjanjuk’s tirade against Germany. Perhaps it was because his court-appointed attorney, Ulrich Busch, read the statement for him, making it more impersonal and lessening the sting.

To obtain a guilty verdict from the court, German prosecutors had to prove two things. First, that John Demjanjuk had been at Sobibor, and second, that he had committed a war crime there. That made it very different from the 2001 denaturalization trial in Cleveland, where all OSI prosecutors had to prove was that John Demjanjuk had been at Sobibor and had lied about it on his visa application.